About the PRIDE Teaching Guide

Click on the sides of the book to turn the pages.

The PRIDE Reading Program Printed Teaching Guide is an invaluable resource that includes step-by-step instructions for you whether you are a new or experienced teacher. The scripted lesson plans will support instruction for you in every step of the PRIDE Program giving you the opportunity to teach your student with great success.  

Lesson Format

Each concept that you teach your student is divided into three sections. Each new concept is first presented in the Introduction Lesson, then practiced along with previously taught concepts in the Practice Lesson, and then spiraled through to the Reinforcement Lesson, providing a comprehensive review. Each lesson is organized in a way that makes it easy for you to engage your student in explicit, systematic, and multisensory reading instruction.  

The Teaching Guide must be used in conjunction with the Student Workbook. It cannot be used by itself.

Levels 1-5 follow a consistent 10 Step Lesson structure for each concept covered. These include:

• Sound Cards
• Phonological Awareness
• Red Words (Sight Words)
• Word Building with Letter Tiles
• Reading Words, Sentences, Stories
• Fluency Practice
• Game and Activity
• Dictation of Sounds, Words, Sentences
• Progress Check

To learn which concepts are covered in each level, visit the Scope and Sequence HERE.

Schedule and Pacing

The Introduction, Practice, and Reinforcement lessons are designed to take between 30 and 60 minutes each to complete. In order for students to make the maximum amount of progress, we recommend that the student receives an uninterrupted 60 minutes of instruction 5 days a week. Younger students or those who are not able to complete 60 minutes can benefit from 30 minutes of instruction 5 days a week. You can break lessons into 30 or 60 minutes blocks as follows:

Do not feel like you need to push through an entire lesson in one sitting. If your student needs more time with an individual step in the program simply mark your place in the ‘Student Notes’ section in the back of the Student Workbook. The next time you work with your student, start off with a quick Sound Card review and then pick up where you left off.  

Some concepts may take a week or more to complete. A number of variables including your student’s age, attention span, and the difficulty of the concept being taught will play a part in how quickly a skill will be learned.

Progress Checks

Progress Check assessments are available to test each concept in the PRIDE Reading Program. There is one Progress Check per concept. Once students achieve 80% mastery on the Progress Check, they are ready to move on to the next concept. If a student does not reach 80% mastery, you might want to further teach the concept by teaching the Introduction, Practice, and Reinforcement Lesson again. If a student is close to 80% mastery, you will want to proceed to the next concept, because the lessons’ spiral design will provide students with continued practice throughout the program.

Teaching Prompts

The Teaching Guide will prompt you to preview the sounds before you teach them to your student by listening to a sound clip. If English is not your first language, these sound clips will help you pronounce the sounds you are teaching correctly.

You will notice some symbols in your script. As a way to represent the sounds of letters in the Teaching Guide, we use slashes. For example, /m/ stands for the spoken sound mmmm (as in mittens).

• A smile above a letter, as in /ă/ represents the short vowel sound (as in apple).
• A straight line above a letter, as in /ā/, represents the long vowel sound (as in ape).

When the text is black, that is your teaching directions and when the text is “blue”, that is your script to read aloud to your student.

Teaching with Fidelity

In order for your student to reach and exceed grade-level reading, you will need to teach the PRIDE Reading Program with fidelity. This means teaching the program exactly as designed. Take your time, go slowly, and make sure that your student completes every step and every lesson in the program.

In the upcoming units, you will be watching videos to learn how to teach the PRIDE Reading Program. At the end of each video, you have the opportunity to practice reading the script for each step in the Online Teaching Guide and get comfortable with the process before you start teaching your student.